Do the Privacy Policies Reflect the Privacy Controls on Social Networks?

An increasing number of people are sharing ever-greater amounts of private information, making social networking sites a "personal data ecosystem". Such networks publish lengthy privacy policies explaining their data practices and provide users with extensive privacy controls to manage what they share and with whom. Despite this, privacy concerns over social networks are on the rise. It is not clear whether the published privacy policies are effectively reflected in privacy controls of the sites. In this paper we describe an exploratory approach that examines whether a clear mapping can be established between the privacy policies of social networking sites and the privacy controls. Our preliminary results show a significant disconnect between the two dichotomies.